Peugeot Fiat

Currently reading:
Peugeot Fiat

To date VAG have invested somewhere between $20-30Bn in electric cars.



While fiat previewed a concept car, there was nothing to suggest it actually worked as a car given it was a static display at a motor show.



The idea was good and would make a adequat replacement to the panda in the future, but fiat really don’t have the technology to make it work, or at least they didn’t. With Peugeot they have access to technology they did not have before. However even then they are hugely behind the likes of tesla in terms of technology, and with the massive investments VAG have made they are likely to be hugely behind them as well. With Peugeot only recently acquiring Vaxhaull and fiat investing heavily in alfa and maseriti, there may not be much money left in the pot of either company to launch a Long term plan to electrify the range.



Fiat have a long history of concept cars never making it to marking, in this instance I think the Centoventi is likely to join those ranks. That is to say I’d wager the Centoventi never sees production.



The best move forward at the moment would be a new Punto based on the same platform as the new corsa/208 but bear in mind that the new e-corsa is still over £21,000 in basic spec.



This price is getting on for what the top spec 500x cost so the profit margins on small electric cars is going to be very tight and may mean they are not worth while. It could effectively kill super minis for the time being.



If we really get lower cost electric cars with good range and longevity, will there really be a need for city cars?

My understanding was they were so popular here in Europe for two reasons: high priced fuel, and some places such as Italy having really small streets / passages making bigger cars more hassle.

And as someone who knows a lot about it, do you see the government finding a way to tax electric cars / charging to the extent they’ve always been able to with fossil fuels for motorists? Genuinely interested in these questions!
 
I'm not well enough off to consider a Tesla (or electric Kia/Hyundai for that matter) but where I live a Panda size car really is a big bonus. The roads are narrow, with few grass verges so passing cars coming the other way depends on them being sensible with the space to their left. The lanes are even worse. They were built by clearing rocks into banks either side leaving the road sunk below the surrounding fields. The grassy banks either side are actually piles of rocks held together with soil and hedge roots.

The towns have narrow streets so if there is any street parking, the remaining space is tight. The new blobby Smart is much the same width as a Panda and they are going 100% now electric but the usable range is woeful. Fiat would have to do better than that.

Tesla are unlikely to see the need for small cars as the US generally does not have a road width issue and the towns have ample pull off space for street parking. The Tesla Truck is actually a great idea and I know a few builders who would happily have one. But its HUGE so again not very practical on our narrow lanes. But I guess no worse than any of the other big 4x4 trucks.
 
I'm not well enough off to consider a Tesla (or electric Kia/Hyundai for that matter) but where I live a Panda size car really is a big bonus. The roads are narrow, with few grass verges so passing cars coming the other way depends on them being sensible with the space to their left. The lanes are even worse. They were built by clearing rocks into banks either side leaving the road sunk below the surrounding fields. The grassy banks either side are actually piles of rocks held together with soil and hedge roots.

The towns have narrow streets so if there is any street parking, the remaining space is tight. The new blobby Smart is much the same width as a Panda and they are going 100% now electric but the usable range is woeful. Fiat would have to do better than that.

Tesla are unlikely to see the need for small cars as the US generally does not have a road width issue and the towns have ample pull off space for street parking. The Tesla Truck is actually a great idea and I know a few builders who would happily have one. But its HUGE so again not very practical on our narrow lanes. But I guess no worse than any of the other big 4x4 trucks.

It's pretty handy where I live in Northern Ireland too. The city, though compact, doesn't have any abnormally tiny passages really. But country roads do get extremely tight at times and the Panda squeezes through without issue. I genuinely think two i40 sized cars would require one to reverse, which to me would be a PITA - then again they're likely to have reversing cameras, electric folding mirrors and whatnot to assist, but still time consuming lol

I was hearing about the Tesla Space Truck and the tweet they put out showing it tow a Ford F150. Apparently an executive at Ford replied and offered a more 'apples to apples' comparison if Tesla would be brave enough to accept - which, given the narrow and complex physics behind that PR stunt, I doubt they will. But Ford also said in a few years when they release an all-electric F150 they'll also be keen to do a comparison. Competition is heating up, Elon!
 
There is a catch 22 situation when it comes to small electric cars and that’s the size of the car limits the size of the battery. Yet people still want a good range. The motors in something like a bit tesla don’t take up much space compared to the size of the car, but in a small car like a panda a tesla motor would take up the whole engine bay. Especially when you throw in the gubbins for aircon power steering etc.

Batteries generally go in the floor which has to be armoured to stop things busting into flames if you ground out on a speed bump. The battery and the armour add weight and cost, this is why the corsa which only has a 50kw battery (half that of a tesla) still costs over £20k

Who is going to pay £20+ k for a budget panda, the whole point in the panda is its cheap and simple.

To make an electric car worth while for the manufacture they need to make something that is worth the money they are asking for the car, they can justify a couple of grand more for something like a corsa but an electric panda could be £6-10k more than a petrol version and you’d have to be mad to buy an electric version that costs that much more. This on its own could be lethal to fiat unless they look at electrified fiat 500x and some new version of the Punto. A new fiat 500 with an electric drive train could do well but would need to be a high end luxury version to justify the price tag, the mini-e for example is still in the £20k+ area but it has all the luxuries that they can throw at it, where as the 500 didn’t get cruise control till 2015. It would also need to get bigger which may kill its small car appeal
 
II was hearing about the Tesla Space Truck and the tweet they put out showing it tow a Ford F150. Apparently an executive at Ford replied and offered a more 'apples to apples' comparison if Tesla would be brave enough to accept - which, given the narrow and complex physics behind that PR stunt, I doubt they will. But Ford also said in a few years when they release an all-electric F150 they'll also be keen to do a comparison. Competition is heating up, Elon!

It's a pointless test but mostly about weight. The Tesla Truck is heavy so can put more power down. Ford initially said bring it on and we will compete with our biggest truck. But then backed down, because the other variable is how fast you can load your transmission. Electric cars do it in milliseconds, engine, clutch, gearbox, backlash, etc prevent any engine car getting drive before the electric car has them slipping.


Elon Musk has really thrown the cat into the pigeons. He is now so far ahead that ordinary Big Auto is stuffed AND he has no legacy industry with stranded assets to deal with. It's another iPhone moment. Anyone waiting for Tesla shares to drop will have a long wait. China is already making Model 3s. Model Ys are already being made and battery giga-factories keep going up.
 
Elon Musk has really thrown the cat into the pigeons. He is now so far ahead that ordinary Big Auto is stuffed AND he has no legacy industry with stranded assets to deal with. It's another iPhone moment. Anyone waiting for Tesla shares to drop will have a long wait. China is already making Model 3s. Model Ys are already being made and battery giga-factories keep going up.

Let’s not get too carried away, Ford sold more F Model trucks in North America last year than tesla have sold cars in all the years they have existed and all the models they have ever made. Tesla have yet to make a million cars, yet fiat managed to sell 5 million puntos with in 10 years of production.

Electric cars are having a big impact on the car market especially now but tesla is not ‘running away’ with it at the moment, especially when the cheapest tesla would cost the same as a fairly high spec bmw or mercedes.
 
There is a catch 22 situation when it comes to small electric cars and that’s the size of the car limits the size of the battery. Yet people still want a good range. The motors in something like a bit tesla don’t take up much space compared to the size of the car, but in a small car like a panda a tesla motor would take up the whole engine bay. Especially when you throw in the gubbins for aircon power steering etc.

Batteries generally go in the floor which has to be armoured to stop things busting into flames if you ground out on a speed bump. The battery and the armour add weight and cost, this is why the corsa which only has a 50kw battery (half that of a tesla) still costs over £20k

Who is going to pay £20+ k for a budget panda, the whole point in the panda is its cheap and simple.

To make an electric car worth while for the manufacture they need to make something that is worth the money they are asking for the car, they can justify a couple of grand more for something like a corsa but an electric panda could be £6-10k more than a petrol version and you’d have to be mad to buy an electric version that costs that much more. This on its own could be lethal to fiat unless they look at electrified fiat 500x and some new version of the Punto. A new fiat 500 with an electric drive train could do well but would need to be a high end luxury version to justify the price tag, the mini-e for example is still in the £20k+ area but it has all the luxuries that they can throw at it, where as the 500 didn’t get cruise control till 2015. It would also need to get bigger which may kill its small car appeal

Perhaps the cheaper end of the market will be city cars with a range suitable ‘for the city’. So using a city car as a ‘long trip’ car how some people do today might not be possible. But if bigger things change, maybe people won’t even own these cars but they’ll be made for automated / city car share schemes through some kind of iPhone app.. Or maybe we’ll see people no longer really opt for small cars if it becomes cheap enough to own and run a bigger one, with a bigger more usable battery.

I always thought the e-Up showed the price bump well, compared to the petrol version. BUT, as much as personally dislike that car and aren’t fond of the Golf, it’s good that VW had the idea to make cars that people “know and love” and make them fully electric, so going form your diesel Golf to your ‘all electric’ car felt familiar, and not like having to go to some weird, poor attempt at a ‘futuristic design’ car (or one with a name like Zoe) affecting street cred lol. The Prius etc is cool that it’s forward thinking in its design, but it doesn’t age well looking back. I think it’d be nice if car makers did keep their popular models of today and electrify them - like they ‘diesel-fied’ them when those engines came to prominence.

I’d love an electric Panda, but I wouldn’t bank on it being made for the complications mentioned.

And again, as much as I love the Panda and 500, options like cruise control are sorely missed by people like me. See, the logical answer is “if you want fancy features get a more upmarket car”. That’s indisputable about the Panda, but shocked it didn’t come to the 500 until as recently as 2015. I thought the 500 had it from launch being the expensive car it is (for what it is).

Hopefully Fiat can keep its flair with PSA. I reckon if the brand has anything, that’s it. So if they dumb it down under PSA, they might just become what Vauxhall was under GM, a combination of parts bin pieces with a badge slapped on it that used to mean something. Those would be sad times
 
Indeed Ford (and everyone else) have sold more trucks in a week than Tesla have built - ever. But that's all in the past. The future is electric and Big Auto has been caught napping. Tesla are already cleaning up at the profit end of the market.


If you can ignore the kids playing this is interesting stuff
 
Last edited:
Tesla are already cleaning up at the profit end of the market.

Errr.

$967M loss so far in 2019 would tend to disagree.

They have only made a profit about 5 times (quarters) in the 10 year history of their history !

On the flip side Ford Expect something like $6.5BN profit for 2019....
 
Last edited:
I think Tesla's merits are ruined by the CEO. Elon Musk and how he acts (think that incident with the rescue diver recently in the media, well, the court case) - completely throws out any aspiration I have to be associated with the brand.


But the technology is going in the right direction and it seems they seem to learn from mistakes and grow.


I think they'll be like Apple.. wildly successful, perhaps the most successful someday. But there'll always be a group of people who hate them and stick to the old school views of motoring etc. Some valid complaints I'm sure, other just rediculious... like people who lecture you on 'why the iPhone is sh*t' when it clearly isn't, you know..
 
Regardless of their actual profits, Tesla ARE cleaning up at the profitable end of the car market. That's where they have to work as their startup costs are high. But that's also where all car makers need to move metal as that's where they make their money. Tesla only needs to take 5% of the truck market to put a big dent in the profits of everyone else. They are likely to take a lot more than that when they ramp up production.

US truck buyers are incredibly brand loyal. The Cyber Truck (silly name) had to be different, otherwise why go outside your usual brand? Rivian are just doing more of the same with a lekky engine. Even with Ford's backing that's not enough.

I mentioned Tesla's start up costs, but all manufacturers have similar costs when going electric. had it not been for Tesla we would not see any dramatic change for many (many) years. Musk does not have the costs and stranded assets of ICE vehicles and that's a huge expense which could scupper the less buoyant car makers like Fiat. Musk also has a large and growing charging network which no other car maker has.

Tesla profits? The money simply gets ploughed back which can be done in USA because taxes are paid by people rather than the companies. As for cash raising Musk can get all he needs in a week just for the asking. No other company has that sort of following. Yes he was an idiot over the Thai football kids but he should have simply sent his submarine over. It might have worked. There was no need to get into arguments with the team on site. To be fair there was no reason for the team to disrespect Musk for offering to help. Who cares if it gained publicity for Tesla etc.
 
Don’t get me wrong, I like tesla and what they are doing, however they don’t even have 5% of the car market and truck buyers, especially in the states where they want their trucks to cover huge areas of land are not going to be quick to switch to an electric alternative, I’d still say the truck will be popular as the number of people reserving them has already proven. I don’t see them ever managing 5% of the truck market at the moment, it’s not even going to be available for a couple more years and who knows how the design could change in that time.

Tesla are making huge waves in the car market. But they have been about for years and you have to wonder how much of the drive in electric vehicles has been driven by tesla and how much by changing attitudes tesla or not.

Yes they have massive overheads but even then they should be much more stable in the market now with several cars in their line up and multiple manufacturing facilities, they could be profitable but they are currently not. They have plenty of cash held if they need to dip in so they are not struggling, but in this instance I’d have to disagree that they are “cleaning up” at the “profitable end” of the market. Only selling electric cars makes there market very narrow.

They do have their charging stations but they are tesla only and many older tesla owners have free super charger access for life. It’s only recently they started charging owners of new teslas, so this actually costs them money.
Ironically they do quite well out of companies like fiat who pay them huge sums of money to team up and share their CO2 burden as teslas produce no tail pipe Co2 but the likes of Jeep produce a lot. That’s probably a very lucrative deal for tesla as it’s essentially free money from their competition.
 
The trend is pretty strong. Tesla Model 3 was UK's third best selling car (all types) in August 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/technol...del-3-was-uk-third-best-selling-car-in-august

In USA they sold 77% of all electric cars sales in November. Yes its a small market but the the others are just not catching on (or not bothering).

2019 Jan to Nov, the USA small to midsize luxury car market Tesla Model 3 was the biggest seller with 128,000.
BMW All models sold just 103,000, Merc, Audi, Lexus all came below that. The top selling brand under ALL power types was one model from Tesla.
Source CleanTechnica.com

Tesla have all the cash they need and it's looking like they will make a profit (above margin) in 2020. But if Musk does his usual, any excess will get ploughed back. I doubt there will be any dividends to shareholders.

The sad fact is that electric cars are still too costly for the mass market and they may never really work for small cars.
 
Last edited:
I can see what you’re getting at and I’m not saying that tesla is a failing company or not shifting cars but it boils down to how you interpret the information. So the model 3 only came out in the uk at around August time and there where thousands of cars on back order, “sales figures” by month are worked out from the number of cars registered with the DVLA, so the fantastic August sales figures where the new pre ordered cars arriving in the country.

It’s probably a similar thing in the US with thousands of back orders of the model 3 being fulfilled.

If you want an electric car you buy a tesla, you want a vacuum you buy a dyson etc they are the flagship product for what they represent and while you say non of the other companies are doing anything, there are a flood of new cars coming in the new year from most manufacturers which are not only normal mass market cars they are also reasonably prices, the corsa, Mini for example will be about £24k versus twice that for a tesla.

This entries merger between fiat and Peugeot is quite literally an indication of companies bothering.

Elon musk likes to rush everything to market and tesla owners will put up with a lot for their beloved electric cars, however a BMW, Mercedes or other large luxury car buyer would not put up with the problems that all models of tesla have had over the last few years. Teslas are plagued with electrical problems, I saw one on a video recently that popped the boot when ever you pressed any buttons and tesla dealers are not easy to find to get these things fixed.
 
The sad fact is that electric cars are still too costly for the mass market and they may never really work for small cars.

The other question is, it worth bothering electrifying small cars unless petrol stations start to shut down at a rate that makes them un-viable?

For some reason there's always 1 answer...even if that answer isn't correct for all situations. 10 years ago it was diesel..for everything even if it didn't work in everything. Today it's electric in everything even it doesn't actually work in everything.

I absolutely see the merit in taking a big car or a medium one and electrifying it. Especially something medium large SUV, because it already takes a lot of resources to build it. Even the best are not particularly efficient in use, and they tend to be on the road for a long time chucking out slabs of Co2 over many years.

But take a 107 or Panda or an Up! Or whatever and it starts to make a lot less sense. 1st the kerb weight is barely a tonne if that so batteries will add somewhere around 33% on top if you can find the physical space in the shell to put them.

The extra weight requires more extra weight, so beefier brakes, springs, crash structures so before long you get to a price point that's similar to a big car and a similar kerb weight.

Also as they're generally cheap run arounds and it's not uncommon for this style of car to be at 50k miles at 10 years old and scrapped at less than 100k. That combined with fuel efficiency of this style of car means you aren't really saving a massive amount of CO2 but you are adding it in at the point manufacture.

The short life, high efficiency and low miles will affect the payback period greatly compared to swapping something much less efficient.
 
The other question is, it worth bothering electrifying small cars unless petrol stations start to shut down at a rate that makes them un-viable?

I'm sure you are right. Around my way we have Tesco, Sainsbury, Esso and a Texaco. Once outside the town the next ones are 10 miles away. The Esso and Texaco don't look over flush for cash so any crimps on turnover will have them walk away.

The new quite large electric cars have energy consumption equivalent of 100mpg to 150mpg. That makes the 50mpg Panda look terrible so we all know what the legislators will do to the tax. Road pricing has to happen but the tax on petrol wont go down.

The solution might be conversion to electric. Buts costs will have to fall (a lot) to be worth doing on cars like the Panda and useful range is crap. https://www.express.co.uk/life-styl...attery-conversion-Tesla-Transition-One-petrol
 
Last edited:
The new quite large electric cars have energy consumption equivalent of 100mpg to 150mpg. That makes the 50mpg Panda look terrible so we all know what the legislators will do to the tax. Road pricing has to happen but the tax on petrol wont go down.

It was my understanding was that was an in use calculation rather than well to wheel however if I'm wrong awesome.

50 mpg versus 150 isn't great but unless energy required takes into account production and disposal it's not a true reflection.

Effectively the more efficient the standard car you are replacing is the longer the longer the payback period gets.
 
Last edited:
We have an EV ninja in our group and he works at stratospheric level and has bespoke waistcoats an shoes and he said only a couple of weeks ago, the corsa, Adam, 107 group etc will all disappear, no financial appetite due to all the reasons mentioned, but did say that as, or if the EV market takes hold then when they are common place they will come back as by such time advances in what will be common place tech will allow manufacture and use with a monetary gain.
 
Back
Top